Removal of global federated feed and/or local instance feed

@alyazabirze
>a way for people to shop for confrontation
this is a very good name for the phenomenon i have struggled to put a name to

@Alyaza Birze while bluesky doesn't have a "the global feed", what it does have is an API firehose to every user's every post or action on the network, and people acting either out of malice or naive cluelessness, to build web-based tooling to scrape the firehose with queries, enabling even relatively private individuals' posts, block actions, likes, follows, all to be in the global abuse domain. somehow I think that's worse than a "global public algorithmic feed" imo

@sirocyl bluesky is our evil mirror universe clone with a goatee

Federated / global feed: Hard no on my end, at least not without a lot of convincing. I do think it means we need to consider other ways to discover each other and encourage them - that's a challenge I welcome!

Local/instance feed: neutral/unsure on this one. Seems like a decent place for people without technical skill to find people, but if instances ever get to 30+ people they could have (on a smaller scale) the same issues as a federated feed. Since I'm unsure, agreeing with froggebip that it should be a call on an instance by instance basis.

Remembered one other thing about global feeds: both on Mastodon and Cohost, the presence of a global feed allows a conflict people feel strongly about to take over what feels like the entire website, before any sort of moderation action or conflict resolution can take place. Without a global feed, conflict grows more slowly as people see posts by people they know, and the intensity can be damped down.

It's like a low-intensity surface wildfire in a healthy forest, versus a crown fire in a forest that's had fires suppressed with no controlled burns. The former might scorch trees and burn brush, but it makes a forest healthier, in the long run; similarly, low-intensity conflict can be a way to expose important tensions that can be resolved via other mechanisms. In the latter, there's enough readily available fuel that spread is rapid and destruction is total; everyone feels foul about what happened, including the people responsible for moderating the conflict or fixing the issues inspiring it.

Remembered one more thing: global feeds are one of the main dark patterns identified by the Cohost staff, and Cohost users would probably not be big fans of seeing them after we said we'd stick to cutting out dark patterns.

I've never found the global feed on Mastodon all that useful for anything other than letting it wash over me. I don't really need my presence any more felt than it usually ends up being, and if the global feed stayed around it would probably be more useful than anything just as a curiosity to tune into every so often, like daytime cable.

I feel strongly that local feeds, however, should exist, to give prospective users a good idea of an individual instance's vibe as well as making it easier for admins to keep tabs on their own population when necessary, for moderation and as a "health check" of how much use their instances are seeing. That said, I don't think it should be a hard requirement, but maybe it should be declared in the instance's guidelines? If you're looking for a local feed, you're not going to want to choose a feedless instance, after all.

Absolutely Not re: permitting federated, public, global feeds. That's like filling a firehose with gasoline and setting it loose on a dry plain surrounded by woods in August, to ape the analogy by @walking mirage above. It'd serve to hurt us and our users far more than any consequential gain of discoverability, visibility or reachability in the network.

Instance-local feeds, toggled on by the instance admins, hopefully with users able to individually opt out from seeing, or being seen, however: I'm okay with it, no major objections otherwise.

@sirocyl honestly in a lot of clients, the instance local and federated feeds are kinda hard to get to

my opinions are reasonably well known and documented, as one of the people who initially advocated for local feeds.

so: “will majorly object to any unconditional restriction on local feeds”; “neutral on federated feed”

what i have to add is this:

• we must be very careful to avoid the existence of “the mastodon[.whatever] administration clique’s personal global PVP feed” and i wish i were joking.

useful decentralized tool, yes. harassment vector, also yes.

• meta (derogatory) tends to spread anyway, via subposts. these days my meta (derogatory) knowledge comes from sub posts

i am guilty of this. however, the pace is (as people have said) much more reasonable. i also believe that the existence of dedicated forums (consensus) will help reduce the need for this terrible back channel

@kouhai on “the mastodon[.whatever] administration clique’s personal global PVP feed”, what are you referring to with this? I'm largely unfamiliar with the broader fedi culture, so just trying to understand the concern being raised here

afaik I'm the one who reopened this can of worms on discord. I'm pretty convinced by all the arguments posted here so I mostly just want to thank everyone for taking the time and effort to write in here.

The federated feed is not a feature that I found particularly useful on my (small) fediverse instances, so I was kind of more coming from an angle of "is it worth spending our limited time and energy on removing the federated feed from server implementations if there isn't an easy toggle", and I think my answer to that is now "yes".

I found the argument around how having federated feeds impacts moderator workload to be especially convincing, since one of the top things on my mind is "how do I avoid overextending myself and the impact that my burnout would have to those on my node".

@viviridian i figured that since it was a conversation that keeps happening, it'd be important for us to talk about it here so we could all get our thoughts together in one place (which can be consulted later also)

Federated Feed: No, no, no, a million times no. Absolutely not. The downsides to having a League-wide global feed far outweigh any potential benefits that it could bring to user discoverability. The high-volume, unfiltered firehose of content is a really good way to put content in the faces of people who do not want to see said content - and no, CWs, tags and user-side blocking are not viable solutions to this problem. Sandbags only reduce the amount of damage caused by a flood - they don't prevent it, so let's not give users a "flood your timeline" option. The inclusion of federated feeds in the League is something that I an very strongly against, and it will take very good arguments as to how they can be explicitly beneficial for me to move off this stance - discoverability is not good enough.

Local Feed: This one has more nuance to it. Overall, I stand neutral-to-somewhat-negative on these. The local feed is still a flood - but it's a contained one (usually). I'm still not the biggest fan of them, because even though it's necessarily smaller and more local than a federated feed, it is still a feed of content that you did not explicitly sign up to seeing. Cohost encouraged feed curation, where you decide exactly which users and exactly which tags you want to see in your feed - I'd like to see this spirit carried forward into the League. I worry that local feeds may act as a crutch that users rely on to view posts from users, instead of taking the time to intentionally think about and create their own feeds. That intentionality is, to me at least, one of the reasons Cohost felt so much healthier than most social media - it encouraged you to actively think about what you wanted to see, and ignore the things that you didn't like, so they don't have a negative impact on your experience with the site. Given that, I still personally view local feeds in a generally negative light.

However - I am aware of the limitations of the technology that we are using. The nature of federation makes discovery more difficult than it was on Cohost. Users on other instances are hard to find unless someone else on your instance has found them already, and tags don't always present a full overview of posts across the network - only limited to the nodes that your node already knows about. In particular, this is a big problem for personal nodes - tags in particular will be almost completely non-functional to a personal node, because having content on tags there is predicated on the user having already found people posting under that tag already, severely limiting their utility there. Having other people on the node doing their own independent discovery will help improve the situation sometimes, but not always. Given this, I see the utility provided by a local feed - providing a place to find interesting posts when looking for tags and users fails. That's why I'm nowhere near as hardline as I am on the federated feed here - the impact of the flood is much weaker than in the case of federated feeds. Assuming one joins a node that they feel has a community they'd be welcomed in, local feeds have a much lower risk of presenting posts to members that they don't want to see. I think for this reason, it's something best left to node staff discretion. While I don't see them being as entirely harmful as federated feeds, there are valid arguments both for and against local feeds in my eyes, and I don't think node staff should be locked into a decision between one and the other.

Federated/global feeds: absolute "no" as implemented on Mastodon or as ended up occurring on Cohost; open to considering proposals for mitigations that would effectively eliminate the hazards in them. Whether such mitigations are even possible is another question, but.

Local feeds: should absolutely be an option for nodes, but specifically an option. If a node determines that even its own local feed is causing too much trouble, they should be able to make decisions about how (or whether) it operates as appropriate.

(wanted to get some thoughts out. hope to add more another time)

Global feed: Against. Something that became important for me on cohost was the barrier to communication; it required effortful and intentional decision making to find, connect, and then communicate with others. Global feed is antithetical to that; low barrier and low intention in interacting with others.

local feed: if given the option, I would want it turned off on my viewer. If we are committed to small instances, then there’s a probability that most instance members are following each other and the local feed is redundant. Still feels like a dark pattern to me, so leaning more neutral/against. A compromise could be giving people the option to turn it off or set it turned off by default. I guess also asking what role or affordance does local feed offer and then asking if we can provide that through alternative means besides a local feed?

just chiming in to pretty much agree with everyone: global feed hard no, local feed up to the node.

if some nodes wind up particularly large and it becomes a problem we might want to revisit this with an upper limit, but TBH it seems unlikely that a node running into moderation problems over its local feed would choose to keep it in the first place; doesn't seem necessary to preempt that. if it does become a league-wide problem, we can address it then (which would inherently also give us a better idea of what the threshold should be before instituting one).

Worth noting that "Unlisted" / "Quiet Public" is an option (basically public but doesn't show in timelines or on gts for logged out users) and we could set it as people's default visibility so group timelines are opt-in

No federated. Local can be nice

after trialling viv's fork of GoToSocial with WL patches, i discovered that users actually want the feeds right now and disabling them will be harmful to the experience. so i cannot support this policy at the moment, but i'm not sure when the "Okay We Can Kill Feed" time will come

@Cyril Arcilla This is concerning local feeds, not federated, right?

@sirocyl i believe so; in Tusky i can no longer retrieve my local feed with the patched version. Granted, I'm a node of one, but if it's happening to me it's going to happen to others as well.

@sirocyl no, actually, it was the federated feed that they wanted

Whatever we decide to do, we need to decide it and then stick to it. With patches already going live for Gotosocial, it's becoming imperative that we're all on the same page about this.

I'm still against the global feed, and I still think the local feed should be left up to node staff discretion. I'm not convinced that the federated global feed is all that good for discoverability, honestly, and if we can get a solution in place for a central tag repository then in my mind that should be sufficient.

@muffin j. lord yeah-- honestly i am of the opinion the only compelling case for a global feed (maybe local to a lesser extent) to exist is as a stopgap for functional tags

@ankiolyne i pretty much agree, but I think it will be even harder to turn it off if we use it as a temporary measure than if we just quash this now. I think local can really help if your server is you and friends or people with the same general interests, but part of that relies on the servers staying relatively small - if they become triple-digits massive, it'll be just as bad and no help to anyone.

Against federated feeds

Local feeds are good, but feel to me as more of a makeshift solution while we try to figure out the discoverability issue for tags. Once we have that problem solved we shouldn't need any sort of feeds IMHO

I have some concerns about our current policy based on user feedback I've seen and my personal experience. To ensure we're all working with the same framework, I'll start with some annoyingly exhaustive definitions of terms.

An instance A's Federated timeline shows posts which are:

- 🌐Public visibility, AND ANY OF

- Posted by user of instance A OR

- Posted by anyone followed by a user of instance A, OR

- Boosted by anyone followed by a user of instance A (including a boostbot

like FediBuzz), OR

- Manually federated by a user of instance A (e.g. by searching for the post's

URL in the search bar), OR

- Federated over via a relay.

An user of instance A searching for a tag T will see posts which are:

- 🌐Public visibility, AND

- Tagged with tag T, AND ANY OF

- Posted by user of instance A OR

- Posted by anyone followed by a user of instance A, OR

- Boosted by anyone followed by a user of instance A (including a boostbot

like FediBuzz), OR

- Manually federated by a user of instance A (e.g. by searching for the post's

URL in the search bar), OR

- Federated over via a relay.

An instance A's Local timeline shows posts which are:

- Public visibility, AND,

- Posted by user of instance A

The core of my concern is this: unless we do something explicit to make individual instances act as communities, for example by making them invite-only (which I think we have already identified as being problematic), the only difference between a local timeline and a federated timeline is that the local timeline will have fewer posts on it.

I don't think this meaningfully reduces the risk of context collapse except in that it prevents arguing over whether instance A's rules should be applied to posts from other instances. This is a big deal on The Fediverse, but in leaguespace we have the ability to actually make decisions that harmonize rules between instances, so I think that difference is comparatively irrelevant.

I do think that this makes the local timeline much worse for discovery, because the only posts users will see there are selected essentially randomly (again, unless instances are actually pushed as communities, which we are not currently doing) and will by definition be a small subset of posts on the network that were intended to be available to everyone (so marked by 🌐Public visibility.) I also think that having only local feeds makes the moderation burden seem lower at first glance, without actually reducing the overall moderation effort required, except insofar as poor discoverability leads to fewer interactions.

While Cohost showed that a global feed with one moderator for tens of thousands of users doesn't work, I don't think it proves that a global feed with one moderator per tens or hundreds would be similarly fated to fail.

In other words: I think the local timeline is just as bad for context collapse as the federated timeline, and worse for discovery. We should choose one of:

- allow both

- ban both

- allow both until we have tag visibility fixes at which point we ban both

- allow only local and make some kind of steps towards making instances feel more like communities unto themselves

My recommendation is to allow both for now and then ban both once we have universal adoption of relays and working tag aggregation so people can do discovery that way

@nora The "fewer posts on it" part is the crucial part, especially if it's opt-in. If we continue to push for small, manageable instances as we have been, it helps put a damper on conflicts that embroil the entire network. Context collapse isn't the only problem we're trying to fight by removing federated feeds; the fact that conflicts and discourse can spread like wildfire is another, and (imo) just as important.

that last option is what folks generally seem to be leaning toward (I have not done a poll on this). the primary point of a local feed isn't for discoverability, it's for allowing an instance to function as a community.

i really don't like the idea of a site dropping off the network, for whatever reason (dissatisfaction with how things are going, or the entire project coming to a close, etc), and suddenly all that's on there is a bunch of disconnected users who have never been in the same "space" before. that's not a community, it's a dead website.

they do have their disadvantages, including the lesser context collapse issues, but that's why they're optional. turning them on doesn't run as much of affecting the network as a whole; it increases small-scale connectivity between users without directly affecting large-scale.

we should consider having "not on the local feed" be either an obvious option or the default if we're going to have them, though.

@walking mirage I absolutely agree with both of your major points here. In GoToSocial, at least, "Unlisted" (not on feeds) is the default, so we've got that already.

If we want instances to be communities unto themselves, we need to do more to explicitly facilitate and promote that, imo.

@nora i think we should (collectively) figure out how we can do that.

@walking mirage missed this prior, agreed on all points re: local feeds good actually; to me they're how we create a community from a node.

I'm gonna argue that they should be on by default though: the main case for disabling is "node so big it's the firehose again" which, as you mention, we're trying to minimize anyway. (and as a short-term concern on the technical side, changing states is currently non-trivial on both GTS and Akkoma; no easy toggle, requires adding or removing a source patch.)